Team-Led Property 2: Shared Intelligence

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Team-Led Property 2: Shared Intelligence

Posted by Justin Long ⋅ July 22, 2008 ⋅

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Swarms actively develop information through their members, who gather and share it in a decentralized fashion, without hoarding.

When a single queen ant flies in to a territory, it is the result of random wandering. The queen begins a colony with no map of the terrain. Ant colonies and bee hives both survive and prosper with no survey of the area. Yet they do create maps which they share. Ants create maps that smell, and bees dance to communicate the path to food.

This is swarm intelligence: knowledge is gathered by the whole group and shared by the whole group. In swarm intelligence, processing information and problem solving is not the function of a single ‘genius’ individual, but rather primarily a process of interaction between the members of the swarm.

Humans, too, can create a team or swarm intelligence. This is the total knowledge, insight and memory built up through the collaborative communication of the whole swarm. Unfortunately many organizations and even many teams function as if the individual members of the organization are unintelligent and incapable of making basic decisions in line with the promises and goals of the group. Human swarms instead choose to assume, empower, increase, and tap into the intelligence of the individual team members.

Swarm intelligence does not need to be omniscient. Too many times people are tempted to wait until they know everything before they do anything. In fact, too much information can literally lead to “infoglut”—which can cause a swarm to become paralyzed. Swarms wait until they have just the right piece of information (for example, either they find a piece of food or a trail to a piece of food). Once they have it, they immediately act.

Tools to build it
• Observation: sharing an understanding of the place where you are
• Monitoring: sharing an understanding of how the place is changing
• Insight: discussing the ‘why’ of the ‘where’ and the ‘how’
• Memory: making shared information easily findable

Dumb parts, when properly connected,
can yield smart results.
Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy

Case studies
• Dodge & Cox is a mutual fund firm that uses decentralized leadership, consensus, and swarm intelligence to select corporate stocks to invest in (tinyurl.com…)
• Marketocracy (www.marketocracy.com…) is a community of 60,000 online stock traders that tracks the decisions of its top 100 portfolios to set the investment strategy for its mutual fund. Its index has outperformed the S&P 500 in 11 of the past 17 quarters.

Key Readings

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations. New York: Doubleday.

Kiviat, Barbara. “The cult of committee.” TIME Magazine, August 6, 2007, p. 37, tinyurl.com…

Bonabeau, E. & Meyer, C. (2001). Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business. Harvard Business Review, May, 107-114.